Six More Common Design Mistakes in Roleplaying Games

It’s been some time since I discussed mistakes common to roleplaying games, and designers have not been idle in my absence. Quite the opposite, they’ve been churning out enough mistakes to make a critic weep with joy.* These mistakes show up across multiple games and cause problems wherever they appear. Let’s look at the latest batch.

1. The Wrong Number Of Modifiers

In Fate, you get a whole bunch of bonuses, and they’re all +2.

It’s time for you to attack that troublesome bandit. You just have to add some bonuses to your basic stats, like the +1 you get from your sword, the +2 from your feat, another +1 from your magic braces… Oh no, this is going to take all day.

Alternatively, it’s time for you to make your big speech decrying your rival’s political proposal. First, you’ve got some dirt on your rival’s past. That’ll give you an extra die. You’ve also got a top-secret memo explaining your rival’s evil plan. That’ll also give you an extra die, but sorry, bonuses don’t stack in this system, so you get nothing.

In the first scenario, your system had too many modifiers. In the second, it had too few. Too many modifiers is certainly more common, so we’ll start with that. When a system offers an endless number of options for boosting your roll, things get cumbersome fast. For one thing, it’s just a pain to remember all the different modifiers, positive or negative. Players with better bookkeeping skills gain a distinctive edge as everyone else forgets to add bonuses to their totals. For another thing, it ruins the game’s balance. When a system has a ton of bonuses to choose from, it’s more likely that too many will build up on one character, sending their power level through the roof.

At the other extreme, a system with too few modifiers feels shallow, as if the player’s actions don’t matter. Why bother doing a lot of cool research and prep work when the bonuses flatten out so quickly? Plus, all abilities with the same bonus feels identical, even if they’re distinct in the story. If a character’s laser eyes and telepathic precognition both give +2, it won’t be long before the player stops bothering to distinguish which one they’re using. Finally, it can be jarring for two disparate elements to give the same modifier. This is what happens in 5E D&D, where being invisible gives the same bonus as attacking a prone opponent.

Solutions

Most games are aiming for the sweet spot, where there’s enough depth to make interesting choices, but not so much that it drowns the players. But how do we get there? I don’t have a definitive guide, but in general, if a game has several different types of abilities, it should have several types of bonuses.

A big problem of 3.5 D&D was that the only real bonus most abilities could give was a plus or minus to a d20 roll. That’s what lead to the endless list of +1s. 5E tried to fix that by having only one real bonus, advantage, which let players roll a second d20 and keep the higher result. But 5E still has multiple ways of gaining advantage, so instead of a mountain, it ended up with a frustratingly flat line.

Instead, a system with lots of abilities needs a mechanically robust frame work, so those abilities can give different bonuses. Torchbearer is a good example. Abilities in that game can grant extra dice, make torches last longer, carry extra supplies, etc. All of those bonuses are mechanically relevant within Torchbearer’s framework. Alternatively, it’s okay for a game to have fewer abilities and, thus, fewer modifiers.

2. Objectively Inferior Weapons

In Mistborn, Dueling canes are objectively better than staves and spears. Why would anyone not use one?

Game balance is a complex issue. Imagine a game that has only two weapon stats: damage and speed. A longsword has damage 2, speed 1. A short sword has damage 1, speed 2. Those might or might not be balanced; we’d have to consider how the rest of the system works. But if a short sword’s stats were damage 1, speed 1, that would be obviously worse than the longsword, right? Surely someone would catch it!

Believe it or not, roleplaying games are full of such entries, stat lines that clearly show how one weapon is simply worse than another in the same category. This most often comes up in supplements with long lists of near identical weapons, but it can happen anywhere. For a long time, Burning Wheel only had a dozen or so melee weapons, and yet the sword was blatantly inferior to the axe.*

Sometimes this is a mistake. Sometimes it comes from a designer trying to insert realism into their game. Perhaps they’ve heard that one model of 9mm handgun has more stopping power, so they give it a higher damage value, making it clearly superior to the other entries. No matter the cause, the results are the same: a trap for unwary players. Someone new to 4th Edition Legend of the Five Rings might think a naginata sounds like a cool weapon, not realizing that the bisento does more damage with no other trade-off. Even for veteran players, this is annoying, as it often means they get penalized for using their favorite weapons.

Some games try to use cost as a balancing factor, but a few gold pieces hardly ever matters. It takes a robust economy indeed to make this work, otherwise the difference in price will be lost as a rounding error.

Occasionally, designers or fans of a game will claim that some ephemeral or niche benefit balances a weapon out. In the previous example, it could be said that the short sword is smaller, and therefore easier to conceal. That is technically a bonus, but how often is sword concealing going to come up? Probably about as often as needing to prop a lean-to up with your weapon, for which the longsword is clearly superior.

Solutions

First, it’s okay not to include individual stats for every weapon you can think of. Most games are abstract enough that no one will mind if you have a category marked “swords” instead of having an arming sword and a Carolingian sword. That way you can let players flavor the type of weapon they’re using and not worry about the exact stats.

If abstraction isn’t an option, the hard work begins. You’ll need to go through each weapon and make sure there’s a reason to use it, unless you specifically want some weapons to be inferior. If a short sword has objectively inferior stats to a longsword, the short sword needs to be strengthened or the longsword needs to be weakened. Perhaps the short sword should get a bonus in the first round of combat since it can be drawn more quickly. This will be easier in games that are more mechanically robust, as you will have more levers to tweak. If you’re having trouble thinking of something, the internet is full of videos on how different weapons handle in a fight, watching some should give you inspiration.

3. Meaningless Drawbacks

In Mage, Arcane gives you stealth bonuses and social penalties. In case you wanted to play a ninja-socialite.

Some abilities are obviously powerful, so designers give them a drawback to balance them out. That’s a good instinct except, all too often, the drawback doesn’t matter. Let’s say an ability gives +10 to Persuade rolls because of the character’s empathetic skills. That’s pretty powerful, so the designer gives it a drawback. The character also gets -5 on Computer rolls, because they’re so used to reading emotional cues that unfeeling technology confuses them.

That might sound fine, but it’s only a real drawback if the character is also good with computers. If the player never invests any points in that skill, then it’s not a disadvantage at all. If they go the full-social route, they’re receiving a penalty on rolls they’d have failed anyway, so no big deal.

Abilities with meaningless drawbacks are almost always overpowered. Their bonus was crafted with the idea that the penalty would matter. If the penalty doesn’t affect the game, the ability becomes a free bonus. This can drastically alter the game’s balance, as clever players figure out which skills their characters don’t need and heap all the penalties there.

Beyond game balance, meaningless drawbacks encourage hyper specialization. A normal socialite might consider spending a few experience point to branch out into Computers, but they’ll never bother with such a high barrier to entry. Instead, they’ll focus on what they’re already good at to the point where it’s nearly impossible to fail a roll. This silos each character into their own little world and leaves little room for interaction with each other’s spheres.

Solutions

Despite what many designers seem to think, most games don’t actually need a lot of extra feats and advantages granting bonuses. If a PC wants to be better at persuading, they can raise their Persuade skill.

If a game is going to have advantages and drawbacks, those drawbacks need to matter. That means penalties to other skills rarely work, especially if they are skills outside of the character’s sphere. The ability might cost a lot of meta currency, or it might inflict damage of some kind, but it should do something the character can’t avoid. Penalizing a skill is only appropriate if it’s a skill everyone has to roll on a regular basis.

4. Unclear Skill Application

In Mouse Guard, Persuader and Manipulator sound like different skills, but they’re really the same skill with different flavors.

In a perfect system, every skill would be clearly differentiated, but no system is perfect. Instead, it’s all too common for skills to overlap in their application, causing great confusion for all. You see this when two or more skills have the same objectives but different means of achieving it.

Social skills are by far the biggest offender. In most games, social skills boil down to convincing an NPC to do something. Any other effects are secondary at best. If a PC wants to convince a guard to let them through via logical argument, that’s Diplomacy. If a PC wants to convince the guard by claiming to be a supervisor, that’s Bluff. The result is the same, the only way to choose the skill is by listening to the player’s description of their approach.

While this is most common in social skills, it’s not limited to them. Fantasy Flight’s upcoming edition of Legend of the Five Rings has it baked into the core mechanics. In previous editions of L5R, each skill had a stat associated with it. In this new version, players determine which skill they’re using and then choose a stat based on how they’re approaching the task. Some of these approaches are mechanically distinct, such as using Fire to make something new and Earth to repair something that already exists. But other approaches are merely a matter of flavor, like recalling a fact from memory with Earth versus discovering it by searching for clues with Water. Either way you get the fact!

No matter how it manifests, unclear application has the same problem: it causes a lot of arguments at the table. When it’s not clear what skill should be used for a roll, players have a clear incentive to push for whichever skill or stat they’re best at. The GM might think it’s a stretch, but they don’t have any rules to stand on, so it comes down to a contest of wills.

Even if an argument is avoided, unclear applications reward players who specialize and punish players who diversify. A new L5R player might spread their points out, raising several rings, while a more mechanically savvy player realizes they can spend all their points on Fire so long as they always describe themself doing things with passion and ferocity. From the player’s perspective, this is just good sense. It might feel more natural to roleplay this scene as calm and contemplative, but that would mean using their much lower Void stat, and no one likes being penalized for roleplaying choices.

Solutions

When designing your skills, separate them by what they can do rather than how they do it. For social skills, the Fast Talk and Persuade skills from older Call of Cthulhu editions are a good model.* Fast Talk is for short-term objectives. It doesn’t require a previous connection, but it can’t achieve long-term results either. A character could fast talk their way past a guard, but the guard would soon realize their mistake.

Persuade, on the other hand, allows for much longer term results but requires more time and connection to use. A character could use Persuade to get themself permanently hired at a museum, but only if they had time to wine and dine the hiring manager. Both skills can use lies, both can use the truth, so there’s rarely any confusion over which one to roll.

5. Confusing Flavor With Mechanics

Shugenja never wear armor in L5R. No one knows why.

Flavor and mechanics don’t need to be completely separate. Sometimes they come together in beautiful ways, like when PCs are rewarded with meta currency for good roleplaying. Other times, designers rely on flavor for things that are clearly the province of mechanics.

My favorite example of this is the D&D druid’s relationship with metal armor. For mechanical and aesthetic purposes, druids don’t wear metal armor in D&D, but the reason why is a little strange. Most classes that don’t wear armor simply lack the proficiency, but that’s not enough for druids. In 3.5 they were “prohibited” from wearing metal armor. The books never said who prohibited them, but at least it gave actual rules for what would happen if they wore the armor anyway. In fifth edition, it only says that druids “will not wear” metal armor.

No other explanation, they just won’t do it. There’s nothing about the armor interfering with their powers, just that no druid worth their animal companion would ever be so gauche as to wear metallic armor. They’re fine with metal weapons apparently.

This is a clear case of confusing flavor with mechanics, but it’s hardly the only one. The problem also crops up in a lot of vaguely worded mind-control spells. The venerable Charm Person spell, for example, causes the target to act friendly toward the caster, but what does that mean? When the target is an NPC, the GM can be generous in the interpretation, but when Charm Person is cast on a PC, the definition of “friendly” comes under harsh scrutiny. Would a friend hand over their weapon in a potentially dangerous dungeon? Who knows?

In both cases, the game is supporting an important mechanic by making it into a roleplaying burden. Druid players are told their characters won’t wear metal armor, no matter what the player had in mind. Any target of Charm Person has to suddenly quantify what friendship means to their character, and it’s in their best interests to say it doesn’t mean much at all.

Solutions

Best practice is always to avoid telling players how to play their characters, especially if it’s for something as obviously arbitrary as not wearing metal armor even as they wield metal weapons. If a restriction is social rather than mechanical, it should be explained. Where does the social restriction come from? What are the penalties for breaking it? Otherwise, its best to find a mechanical solution. For druids, it could be as simple as too much metal interfering with their powers.

For mind-control spells, or any other effect that subverts a PC’s free will, it’s important to be as specific as possible. Specify exactly what the target will do, under what circumstances. Otherwise it puts the player in a position where it’s in their interest to argue against the spell’s vague wording.

6. Proprietary Dice

No, just no.

Universal standards are a wonderful thing. No one misses the days when every cell phone had a different charging cord, and we just wish Apple would get on the micro USB train, even if it means a slight drop in performance.

So it is with dice. Since the first edition of D&D, there’s been an agreed upon standard of dice that all roleplayers should own. Some games use more of one kind than another, but in general, you can play any game with the same collection. Maybe you might need to lay in a few more d10s before you start a World of Darkness game, but no one was making games requiring d16s.*

But since nothing good lasts forever, a number of gaming companies are now running with the idea of proprietary dice that you need to buy specially for their games. In the best-case scenario, these turn out to be regular dice with one side replaced by a Doom Blight symbol or something similar, and we can just use regular dice.

That’s not the case with Fantasy Flight’s games, the current leader of the proprietary dice charge. Their Star Wars RPG requires at least two sets of their special dice, probably more if you have a large group. Those dice are useless for any other game, and if you lose one, you have to buy a new set. That’s seriously upping the cost of entry for a new game. To make matters worse, Fantasy Flight’s new L5R game is set to use a completely different set of proprietary dice. Joy.

The alternative to spending a lot of money on new, otherwise useless dice is to use an electronic dice roller. Thankfully, you can usually find one for free online, but that’s not a full solution. Dice rollers are annoying because you have to hand your phone around any time someone else wants to see what you rolled. Also, rolling physical dice is fun. I don’t know about you, but I enjoy taking a handful of polyhedrals and letting them fall.

Solutions

I don’t have a solution for this entry except to stop using proprietary dice. I don’t know if Fantasy Flight’s mechanics could be replicated on standard dice, but nothing they’ve done is worth dropping a bunch more money on dice that can’t be used for anything else. It’s already bad enough with just one company doing it. Imagine needing to get a new set of dice for every single game.

Mistakes come hand in hand with any design process, and with more games coming out each year, there are bound to be more issues to pick over soon. Until then, remember to think critically about every game you try. Otherwise, you won’t know how its design mistakes will manifest at your table.

Treat your friends to an evening of dark ritual murder. In a fictional game scenario, of course.Uncover your lost memories and save the day in our stand-alone game, The Voyage.

And also frustration since a lot of these are in my favorite systems.It had one less armor penetration and identical stats otherwise. Fortunately they fixed that problem in the recent edition.In 7th ed they messed up by adding extra skills that are completely extraneous.Those look weird, by the way.

Comments

Randy Oest

November 18, 2017 at 12:20 pm

Why is the cover for Fate Core shown in the “The Wrong Number Of Modifiers” section when it is never mentioned?

The point about Fate is the common criticism that all situational modifiers are the same because each aspect gives a +2 regardless of context. Which is an understandable criticism, but it is intentional for a good reason.

Everything in Fate games runs on narrative logic, and aspects are no exception. They are simply narratively important facts, and the +2 is simply a game form of Checkhov’s Gun. It is an indication to everyone that this thing is about to matter. If something is important enough to matter more than this, you can always use more than one aspect to represent different elements of it, like both the flames and smoke from a fire having different effects.

Aspects also matter in that they have an additional narrative restriction on the scene. Which is in many ways far more important than the modifier, it indicates whether it is even possible to roll the dice in the first place. Holding an enemy in a joint lock means that they cannot start running away before escaping, while a wall of flames generally indicates you cannot simply run through it.

If you want more complexity, conventional situational modifiers are still allowed however, as you can arbitrarily set the difficulty of things or give weapon ratings to entirely arbitrary things like an incriminating document. You can also do things like having a static floor for rolls. If the room has the aspect Too Dark to See, then you can give a static +3 to the stealth roll, such that a character cannot have an outcome worse than that +3.

Fate is an incredibly flexible system, it simply does this in a rather unusual fashion that takes a great deal of getting used to. Once you get over this point it is great, but getting there can take awhile and is not for everyone.

The mechanical difference between persuasion and deception is minor, but it does come up. It might be harder to use Logos to persuade a guard to neglect their duty than it is to lie and pretend to be someone you are not. Thus the GM could assign that attempt persuasion a higher Difficulty Class (or disadvantage, in 5e). The drawback of using deception is that the NPC is likely to eventually learn that you lied, which will have repercussions unless you are far away by then (the 5e cantrip “Friends” is similar in that regard).

The more important difference between the two is that they require different roleplaying. A lawful good cleric will probably go the Logos route, no matter how difficult. A rogue or bard might use deception just for fun.

About number 6, I really disagree. Most boardgames have custom components and that is fine; the expectation that all RPGs will use the same stuff is unreasonable. We are talking about separate games, you already need to buy the new game… we are used to think of it as just buying the rulebook but really, it is weird that when you buy a RPG it doesn’t come with all required accessories. Many boardgames use standard d6s, but they all come “ready to play” with all the dice you need.

And custom dice allow for some mechanics that would just be cumbersome with standard, numbered dice. You can have different probability distributions without requiring weird math – just print whatever values you want on the faces. You can have different meanings to different results – the same dice can have sides with “deal 3 damage” and “miss” and “discard one card”. You can differentiate dice so they can be rolled at once with different meanings – white dice are your attack, black are your damage, red is a negative consequence. Those things would require either extensive book keeping or copious checking of tables, so they are a case of components making a game better. Of course, not necessarily all uses of “proprietary” dice are justified by a good design, but there are good design reasons to use them.

I really, really like the thought put into the rest of this article, but there’s an awkward, bitter grognard that comes out of Mythcreants when it comes to proprietary dice, and FFG’s in particular. (No mention of WFRP, oddly; always Star Wars.)

#s 1-5 are smart, relevant, and about game design.

#6 is about business practices that the author finds annoying for some reasons that are…well…not a practical issue, at least if years and years of real-life application by gamers around the world is to be believed.

If one WERE going to make a game design objection here, they could talk about the excess cognitive load that proprietary dice place on player for whom they are unfamiliar. They take a thing some (not all) experienced RPG players take for granted and make a change to it that requires memorization (or reference to an explanatory table). And it’s hard to learn new things about aspects of your life (hobby) you take for granted.

But this isn’t what the author says and, in my experience at least, these objections don’t really matter in practice with experienced and new players alike.

To be fair, it is a design objection. The practicality of the components, their quality and the resulting cost are all considerations in game design. I just don’t think using special dice is a design *mistake*; it is a design choice with clear advantages and reasonable downsides.

That is all well and good, but there is one big reason I myself find the practice of burdening an otherwise OK game with specialty physical components that cannot be replicated as physical PDF/scan to be a unpalatable thing: long-term usability of your game.

Say I shelve the game but after a few years I want to start a new campaign; I pull out the book, look for the necessary dice/gizmos… But oops, the necessary specialty components are now nowhere to be found/I’m missing a few pieces/the gizmo is broken. So I deftly traverse the net to buy replacements, only to find out the publisher is OOB or does not produce the components anymore. Off to eBay then, only to find that those components have become rare enough to be sold for nothing less that insanely marked-up prices. Result: my game is now unplayable.

Or see it from the pov of an interested player who reads online about this nice older game that was the absolute bees knees in it’s time, and proceeds to try and get a hold of it. The electronic version of the book is still readily available, but upon reading her/his new purchase it becomes clear the game is unplayable without the custom doodads since no conversion guidelines for use with standard components is provided. The person then deftly goes to traverse the net in order to buy said doodads and runs in the same issues as noted above. Result: the game is now as good as unplayable for future interested players.

You could argue that a lot of that goes for boardgames too, but the whole point of a ttrpg game to me is that you need but a book, some paper, pencils, perhaps some beads/coins/whatnot, ubiquitously available standard dice, your imagination, and you’re basically set.

And sure, availability is also an issue with paper game-material from the 90’s and before, but at least then there was the excuse that the possibilities of electronic publishing were pretty much non-existent anyway. Not to mention, any legality concerns aside, that fans have often made perfectly usable scans of those legacy games.

So yes, I fully agree with the author’s burning dislike for specialty dice/doodads, especially if no conversion guides to common components are provided.

(And don’t even start me on the fact of a publisher taking beloved established franchises and trying to shove their overpriced doodads into them. Yes, I’m still salty about FFG’s boardgamification of WFRP and pissed off that they now try to pull the same gobbledygook with L4R.)

Hello. I wish to comment on #3. In many cases, you are right that drawbacks are often not well thought out, resulting in overpowered abilities. However, many times these drawbacks that “don’t matter” actually have an important effect. They represent a disincentive for players to build characters in certain directions.

Let’s look at your Persuade example. Sure, that’s a big bonus, and the developers may have wanted anyone specializing in Persuade to go for that bonus. But it comes with a big opportunity cost: specializing in Persuade comes with the drawback of not being able to build a Computers character (without severe restriction).

I don’t know if that (or any) specific game has this well thought out, but perhaps the developer didn’t want players to be able to make Persuade/Computers, or Ninja/Socialites, or whatever. Also, players who do go that way, knowing about the penalties, have interesting opportunities for roleplaying built into their character concept. This could also fall under the “traps” category, if it isn’t clear during character creation that these interactions exist, but a developer who has thought out the opportunity costs of a particular build (I would hope) would have been explicit to their players, if only from a lore standpoint.

“In 3.5 they were “prohibited” from wearing metal armor. The books never said who prohibited them or what the consequences of breaking the prohibition were.”

Oh really?

In the very next paragraph after saying that metal armour and shields are prohibited, the 3.5 rules go on to say:

“A druid who wears prohibited armor or carries a prohibited shield is unable to cast druid spells or use any of her supernatural or spell-like class abilities while doing do and for 24 hours thereafter.”

The prohibition is different from simply lacking proficiency and has different penalties. For instance, a druid could wear a breastplate and not suffer a -4 penalty to attack rolls but unless it was made out of unusual materials, (e.g. wood treated with an Ironwood spell), she would be unable to use Wild Shape.

The ‘fluff’ part of the class description also includes “Druids avoid carrying much worked metal with them because it interferes with the pure and primal nature that they attempt to embody.” Also noting that there are oaths regarding the use of metal armour and that druids are part of a large, if diffuse and ununified in action, organization.

Forgive me if I’ve asked this elsewhere. In my experience, in real life there is no such thing as a superior or an inferior weapon type.
In most situations, how one weapon stacks up against another is far less important than which weapon is most suitable for the environment and the situation.
If you’re pressed shoulder to shoulder with your comrades, a 6 foot long sword isn’t much better than a farmers pitch fork. In a crowed shopping center a dirk would probably be a better choice than a rapier. In close country you can move quickly and quietly with a short spear when a long spear will make movement difficuilt and stealth almost impossible. In short, different dogs for different jobs.
So, do most games account for this in some way or is that just too complicated and not worth it for what it adds to the game?

I’ve always wondered why the crunchy bits in most RPG’s don’t used description and expressive language so players can intuitively rate a character and their magic/kit/weapon/skills in a given situation. Consistency in language would be critical, but you could solve every action quickly by simple opposed roles (I suppose it would be kind of like the ladder thing in Fate, but without the ridiculous dice). If you want to keep it simple 1d6 each, if you want to be more precise, d20, if you want to be pedantic, d100, but it would work the same either way.

Yeah, I mean, my home-brew system has a table early on in the task resolution system, under the heading Understanding Modifiers.
Intensity descriptor Modifier
Mild effect + or – 1
Moderate effect + or – 2
Strong effect + or – 3
Very strong effect + or – 4
Exceedingly strong effect + or – 5
Very exceedingly strong effect + or – 7
Catastrophically strong effect + or – 10
Very catastrophically strong effect + or – 12
Indescribably strong effect + or – 15
Unimaginably strong effect + or – 20
But very few systems bother telling the Referee how to do it. Indeed some systems are so fixated with speed that they say just throw in +2 or -2 for each factor that you think is involved and eventually you’ll have a target number of “near enough” (A.K.A. the DM’s best friend rule).

Or did you mean something more about damage when you said crunchy?
You really shouldn’t suffer so many hit points worth of damage.
You should suffer a wound of “maimed” or “injured” or “wounded” or “scratched” or “hurt” as doing so lets the players imagine their characters performing the action.
Which is also part of my home brew system BTW.

I was mainly getting at the sillyness of investing time and effort in a mathematical system when modifiers are piled on willy nilly and the GM just has to make his best guess at challenge levels.
Seems like a more logical aproach would be opposed rolls on 1 static die each (6, 20 or 100), roll under your characters (or the obsticals) level of awesome.
Both roll over? Simultanious damage/injury.
Both roll under? Blades clash! Shields thunder! Banter is exchanged.
In any event, degree of failure/success dictates the concequences; wounds, damaged gear, messy pants, etc

Michael Campbell

August 13, 2018 at 4:45 am

Leon:

Maybe you should referee some games before claiming that G.M.s add on willy nilly modifiers and challenge ratings.

As a G.M. I’ve always tried to imaging the character performing the task and then assigned a difficulty to it.
And I think I’ve retained a level of consistency for my players.

And I’ve used “Automatic” difficulty level quite liberally.
Playing dice with the character should be for when the stakes get high. And that’s it’s own skill for the G.M. to develop.

As to Awesomeness as a single attribute
It’s important to have multiple attributes (or skills) so that players don’t step on each other’s toes.
Q) Who is smarter, Captain Kirk, Dr McCoy or Mr Scott?
A) They have different kinds of smarts.
So too, characters have different kinds of awesomeness.
All hail Jack Black.

I haven’t GM’ed any games yet, that’s why I’m reading as much as I can to find out what I need to know. And many of the articles and videos I have seen talk about finding suitable difficulty levels for challenges, and how to handle munchkins (like my wife) who will pile on as many modifiers as they can.
(Just to be clear, the willy nilly bit was about the munchkins, not GM’s.)
That’s what made me think; If players will try to break the system, so the GM mostly has to eyeball the difficulty level (just the impression I have from what I’ve learnt so far), wouldn’t it be simpler to rate the characters odds of success (with the specific stat, skills, and equipment for the specific action) and roll against the specific counter measures that the opponent has in place at the time?
It’s just an idea.

I’m not sure what you think I meant by “level of awesome”. It was just meant as a place holder for whatever unit the reader feels is appropriate for a target number in a system that works like a percentile system (where you could also use a d6, or a d20).

Michael Campbell

August 14, 2018 at 9:38 am

Leon:

Firstly. There’s no time like the present. And it seems you already have one player on call 24/7. Get busy Refereeing.
Pick a genre you like. Pick a game in that genre and give it a red hot go.

Yeah, sorry, for reading Awesomeness as meaning “single attribute”.
But having a moving target for difficulties is…just more dice rolling:- as far as I can tell (I’ve been experimenting of late).

Easing into G.M.ing is a learned art of progression.
First the players fight a few goblin equivalent goons.
Then a few Orc equivalent goons.
Then a bunch of Orc equivalent goons.
After that, maybe an Ogre equivalent goon.

You start off easy and work up towards a level that is a threat to the PCs.
Eventually you learn Zen game Balance:- you just sort of know that this’ll be a good fit for the player’s to go up against because of the bazillion times you’ve done it before.

Players who stack bonuses aren’t automatically a bad thing. Mike Pondsmith talks about The Mirror, in Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads.
If the players have invented a killing machine, then what happens when they meet their evil selves!?!
Plus games that are normally required to be played with more than a few players can be played with fewer players if there’s a killing machine in the mix.

As I was saying to my nephew when he became uncertain during a game of chess.
The only glory in a gold medal at the Olympics, comes from the fact that the guy who got silver was awfully good.
Therefore your participation whether you make a complete dog’s breakfast of it or not, supports the sliver winner’s “awfully good”, through a proof called “sheer weight of evidence”.
Don’t be afraid of being a GM or even a lousy GM. You’ll be an enigma for the start so you can use that to learn the system before the players figure out where they can…conduct misanthropy.
So participate, for the good of the hobby if you won’t do it for yourself.

Also “break” the system? What does this mean!?!
Did Johnny Wilkinson break Rugby by having the entire English team draw penalties and then boot 3 points all day? Or did he merely use the rules as they stood, to advance his team’s prospects!?!
The system is self repairing because you are a perceptive senescent being and you engage in constant quality control. Every encounter is a chance for the players to earn some X.P. but it’s also a chance for you to develop some skill.

The most harm you can do to the system is to learn to hate it and quit the game. But that actually is a better thing than never playing it in the first place for fear of being embarrassed about doing it wrong (A.K.A. letting players take your game to their happy place).

Most games simply don’t have the mechanical depth to simulate all the factors you’re describing, which would be fine except so many of them decide to keep the “bigger=more damage” bit but not, say, rules for how wielding a greatsword in close quarters is very difficult. That’s where a lot of balance issues come from.

That and over simplifying defensive options.
Duck, Dodge, Dive, Parry and Block should all be different purchases with different costs and penalties and bonuses.
So that the player chooses the option her character will tactically elect (as a first level fighter is usually a “veteran”).

If everything falls into “just make a defense roll”, then following the rule that you can’t use a two-handed sword and a shield at the same time, puts you at a disadvantage to the guy with a two-handed sword (more damage) who says to the GM “I sidestep the incoming blow” and gets exactly (or almost exactly) the same defensive roll as the guy who blocks with his shield and then counter-strikes with his sword, but Mr 2H sword is inflicting substantially larger damage.

One of the great problems with the great granddaddy of role-playing games is that NPC retainer fighters were designed to be so simple to play that the G.M. could run two of them while running the NPC monsters. So you get “magic users have all the fun” as code for magic users have actual options in combat.

I wonder if one could come up with a chart for stats dependent on the situation (colour coding would probably help); open country, close country, cramped space, loose formation, tight formation, crowd, crush, etc.
Though I suppose most GM’s would just apply a little bit of common sense and make adjustments.

Yes and yes.
It really depends on whether or not the rule book can look like a phone-book.
Lots of people steer clear of thick rule books. Which, as a fan of SFB, is a huge obstacle to getting people to play.

In some ways, maybe adding feats to weapons (rather than just PCs) would be the way forward.

On the bonuses. I’m not sure if you’re old enough to remember but in the days of internet cafe’s, Warcraft3 was pretty good, and from what I recall it was very well balanced. A mate and I only managed to break the game once, by pairing up his paladin and my troll witch doctor. Would you know if the person who designed that system designed anything else?

That was actually directed at Oren. He seems have vast and deep knowledge of the subject and i thought he might know the game designer, but reading his profile i get the impression he’s not much older than 30.

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